


Compartmentalization

by Metronomeblue



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Canon Compliant, Charlotte and Sam are already dead so I didn’t mark Major Character Death, Coping, Drinking, Emotional Hurt, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Self-Harm, Ted is asked to clean up Sam and Charlotte post-Join Us (And Die), Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, hoo boy, it happened in canon I think it’s fair game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23548684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: “Ted’s good at coping. At least in theory. Ted’s really good at pretending to cope, pretending not to care, pretending it’s fine. He can make it fine, if he tries. And despite all outward appearances, Ted tries.“Hidgens asks Ted to clean up the bodies of the infected. Ted copes... badly.
Relationships: Charlotte/Ted (The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 51





	Compartmentalization

**Author's Note:**

> Give Ted your coping mechanisms. it’s very therapeutic. I swear.

Things happen. To people, often. To nobody, occasionally. Ted tries not to think about it. Things have happened to him, and he puts them out of his mind. Locks them up in a dark leather suitcase slid under a shelf behind some coats in a closet under the stairs in the house in his head. He doesn’t touch them. Things are better that way. For Ted. For everyone around him. Sometimes, if he tries hard enough, makes himself busy enough, does enough, he can forget. Until something pricks at those memories, and then his whole mind is torn open so they can bleed everywhere. 

But that doesn’t happen much.

Ted’s good at coping. At least in theory. Ted’s really good at pretending to cope, pretending not to care, pretending it’s fine. He can make it fine, if he tries. And despite all outward appearances, Ted tries. 

Charlotte helps. It seems counterintuitive, that fucking a married woman who will never love him back is what brings him the few shreds of joy and peace he can squeeze out of his miserable little life, but sometimes life doesn’t make sense. And despite all outward appearances, Ted does love Charlotte. He loves her in the quiet, listening to the nervous, low rhythm of her breathing. He loves her in crowds, blinking too much and fidgeting, constantly turning her head, looking around, like a deer in a fold of lions. He loves her at work, where they never touch, and at home, where they do. He loves her with words- confusing ones, maybe, cobbled together from what inarticulate expressions of affection he's been given in the past, but words nonetheless. He loves her with his hands, soft on her shoulders, threading through her beautiful, blood-dark hair, tracing the line of her spine. Gentle, because nobody ever touched him gently until he was too old to take to it kindly, and he never wanted to hurt her. He loves her with every thread of his shitty, worthless being, and it’s not enough. 

But it makes him happy to do it. It makes him happy to be with her, and feel the warmth of her skin and the shake of her laugh in her shoulders, to kiss her and feel her breath catch, because it makes her feel, to smell the smoke of her brand of cigarettes and the cherry oil in her lipstick and the violet mints she keeps in her purse because they smell like home to her. It makes him happy to hear her say his name, to listen to her talk, to share the quiet with someone else who whispers when it seems too much to speak. 

Charlotte is quiet, now. 

She’s all blue and red under his gaze, still in a different way from her usual rabbitlike stillness, just a breath from action. She could almost be asleep, even splayed out like this, if it weren’t for all the blood. If it weren’t for the way her stomach is ripped open, blue and harsh with the memory of Sam’s hands. 

Ted wants to throw up. He feels the whiskey burn in his veins, and he swallows his revulsion. He’s not going to throw up. He’s not. Not here. It’s just a mess. It’s just a mess. It’s just a mess.

Hidgens just wants him to clean it up. 

It’s just a body.

She’s just a body, he tells himself. She’s not Charlotte anymore.

He does not believe it. 

He can’t bring himself to touch her. He wants to be gentle, because she’s Charlotte and he loves her, but he doesn’t want to touch her like this, doesn’t want any of this to be happening. He tries, and his hands shake when they come near her. He’s knelt on the ground, his knees wet with blue and red, and he tells himself it isn’t blood. It can’t be. Blood isn’t gelatinous like the blue is, and the red is so cold. It’s just a mess. Just a spill. It’s as easy as it was when he was a kid. Just clean up. Just clean up. 

Don’t give the game away. 

Ted’s heart pounds, painful in his chest, and he breathes. He breathes. The world cracks, his vision blurs. Just like when he was a kid. Clean up the mess. Leave no trace. Put everything back where it belongs. His heart aches with the knowledge that Charlotte does not belong here. She belongs with him, in her own bed, safe and warm and so loved. She doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t belong on the floor, or on a dissection table, or in a grave.

He reaches down, hands flat in the pool of swirling blue and red, and tries to breathe without breathing in the smell of death. The barista and Hidgens are talking in the next room. He wants to ask one of them to do this instead of him. He wants to beg them to let him rest. He wants to sit in one of the chairs again, down the rest of that bottle of whiskey. He wants to stop thinking about Charlotte, and Sam, and the apocalypse.

_ People die sometimes, Teddy _ . He remembers his mother smoking on the front porch, eyes wet but face cold and immovable.  _ You can’t save everyone _ . Her cigarette had glowed, red-gold, and the smoke had spiraled up like a ghost, and Ted remembers thinking she had never looked more like his mother than she did in that moment. 

People die sometimes. But never Ted.

Other people die around him. He stares, cloudy-eyed, into the paintlike miasma of blood and alien blue shit, and when his tears begin to fall into it, he doesn’t stop them. They’ll be wiped away with the blood, after all. They won’t linger.

He breathes until the crying stops, and it feels like something automatic. Like it’s something that’s just happening to his body. He’s not crying. He does not feel like a part of this. He lifts his hands from the puddle, and they’re covered in Charlotte’s blood. Even disconnected, numb with agony, that feels appropriate. It’s his fault. He made this mess. 

He made part of it. He still hasn’t looked up, past the pulled-free organs to the head. He doesn’t think he could bear it, to see Charlotte’s face so disfigured. To see her dead and know. Hidgens killed Charlotte. 

Ted killed Charlotte. 

The bruises on his body are forming, he knows, the marks from where they’d kicked him and punched him and abused him the way he knows he deserved for leaving her alone back there. He wouldn’t have fought back. Not against her. He could never hurt her.

Ted stands, shakily, and washes his hands in the sink. It’s the big metal trough kind, and Ted tries not to think about what Hidgens might be washing in it. His knees are still wet, and the blood has soaked through to his skin. He hates it. He hates all of this.

He rolls Sam’s body over onto its stomach- and it is an  _ it _ , this one. Sam isn’t present for him the way Charlotte is. He can’t even be angry at him. Ted just pulls him, messily, onto a tarp, more blood and more blue shit pooling under him. Ted shifts the tarp, lifts Sam half by half onto the first dissection table. Pulls the tarp out from under him. The fluid pools where it’s meant to, now, but Ted feels no satisfaction, no relief. He feels far-away, sick with grief and disgust and self-loathing.

He has to lift Charlotte. It has to happen. He tells himself over and over to just touch her. He looks at her lying there. He screams, internally, begs for his body to so much as raise a hand, but he can’t. 

He can’t do this. 

He puts his feelings in a box. He puts the box under a shelf. Pulls the coats in front of the shelf. Turns off the light. Closes the door. Walks away.

He slips one arm under her knees, and the other under the small of her back. He lifts, blood dripping from her body, from his hands. He pauses, staring straight ahead.

He will never hold her again. 

He will never hold her again.

He will never hold her again.

He looks down, and there is a dripping blue gunshot through her forehead. Her eyes are closed, though. Her face is still. He kisses her cheek, ice cold. He remembers what it was to hold her living, moving and breathing, soft and lovely. He lowers her onto the second table, and breathes. He looks down at her. He remembers being happy. 

The feelings break out of the box.

Ted breathes. He swallows. He breathes. He feels his heart pounding like illness, feels the fever of grief break across his brow. He can’t. He can’t. He turns away and the world is duller, colder. It’s fine. He’s fine. Things happen. People die.

Clean up the mess. 

Hidgens left him towels, a mop, a bucket. It’s almost helpful, except that to fill the bucket, to clean up the mess means that he’ll have to turn back towards Charlotte. He clamps the suitcase’s locks back down, shoves it under the shelf, closes the door, pushes a bookshelf in front of it. He breathes. He thinks about how good it would feel to have the rest of that whiskey now. He thinks about how good it would feel to be hurt, right now. 

He finds the tender, blood-bruise sink in his side where Sam’s fist landed. He pressed into it, digs in his fingers, gasps at the pain and lets it burn through him. He breathes. The pain comes in waves, intense and then soft, and Ted spends a long moment thinking of nothing as he digs his nails into his side so hard he begins to bleed. 

What’s more blood, anyway. 

The suitcase stays locked, now that his head is more level, now that some helplessness has been exorcised from him. Ted feels like a kid again, sixteen and digging his nails into his arms so he could feel in control. He brushes a hand over those scars, absentmindedly, and forgets the blue shit on his skin until it’s clotted under his nails. 

Ted takes a long, slow breath. 

Clean up the mess.

He washes his hands again. Cleans his arms, too. Fills the bucket. Tries not to look at the tables. He can’t help catching the blue of Charlotte’s sweater, though, the blood-dark copper hair. His breath catches like a sob in his throat. He swallows, breathes, ignores the tears slipping down his cheeks. 

He mops the floor. Tries not to think of how this is Charlotte’s blood. This is where Charlotte died. Ted breathes. Disinfects it. Mops it again. Everything is cold. Everything is so quiet, except for Hidgens and Emma still talking. Still talking. They never shut up. It makes him want to scream. 

He cleans the mop. Cleans the bucket. 

He stands over Charlotte’s body and lets his brain go blank. He should be feeling something. He should be feeling. He was feeling everything before, but now? He feels shame, mostly, for how empty he is now. When he’s allowed to mourn. 

The suitcase won’t come unlocked. He’s sitting there, in the closet under the stairs, taking a screwdriver to the locks, but they won’t come free. He can’t feel anything. 

He looks at Sam. 

Rage burns in him, slow-rolling fire that carves apart his control. He wants to do something. Wants to vent this horrible, furious energy that’s growing in his chest. Ted picks up one of the scalpels on the side rack. He looks down at Sam, considers. 

Nothing. 

He puts it down.

He pulls a chair over from the side, flops down in it like a man bereft of purpose. He looks at Charlotte. He feels cold. He feels empty.

He wants to cry. 

He does.

The suitcase unlocks. 

Ted feels… so much. It overwhelms him, a rush of self-loathing and loss and pain that smashes his control and his restraint and leaves him adrift. It’s a mass of thoughts, disconnected-

_ You’ll never touch her again. You did this to her. She looked so beautiful last night. He killed her. You killed her. She could have called for help. Maybe she did and you didn’t hear her. This is your fault. You promised you’d never hurt her. You’ll never touch her again. She’s so pretty, even as a corpse. Her blood is on your hands. She looks asleep. She’ll wake up soon. You should die. You should have let them kill you. She wanted you to die. You’ll never hear her voice again. You’ll never speak to her again. You’ll never see her again. Hidgens is going to cut her up. Cut her open. She’s just a body now. Your fault. You’ll never hear her say your name again. _

Except Ted can change that.

Ted can change that one thing.

He opens his phone, goes to voicemail. From last night, there’s a message from Charlotte. Fifty-six seconds.

“Hello, Ted,” and his eyes burn, his face contorts. He misses her. He misses her. He loves her. “I know I said that- well, I know I said we shouldn’t meet again. But I missed you. I miss you. And I- I wanted to see you again. Tonight, if you’re free? Sam’s not coming home until late, and it’s so lonely here, and I just thought- well. You know where to find me, Ted. I- I miss you when you’re not here. I know I shouldn’t, but I do. I miss you terribly right now. And oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t- this is Charlotte. I- maybe I’ll see you. Goodnight, Ted.”

He cries, a hand pressed over his mouth. He replays it. 

Replays it. 

Replays it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to the CharTed cult server for breaking me irreparably.


End file.
